Time to go ...

This just makes it that much harder for our boys and girls over there:

US troops in Afghanistan have been placed on alert following the killings of 16 Afghan civilians by a US soldier.

US officials warned of reprisals after the soldier went on a rampage in villages near a base in Kandahar. Nine children were among those killed.

...

It's long past time to get out of that shithole. At this point we've shitted up our own bed so badly that even if we doubled our resources over there it still wouldn't do any good. Just as other nations have learned since time immemorial, Afghanistan is a lost cause.

Update:

Our pal Comrade Misfit says it quite well.

...

I have no idea how this all can be turned around. I believe that if there was a time when we could have prevailed in Afghanistan, it was gone by 2005. We squandered the chance we had to make a difference and, since then, it has been more a matter of denying the flow of the tide of the war. The cheerily optimistic pronouncements from first the Bush Administration and now the Obama Administration have been the equivalent of putting pretty siding over a rotting structure.

...

Yeah, if we would have done it correctly from the get go, we might have had some success there, but the Chimp and his henchmen were never serious about Afghanistan. All they wanted was to use it as a stepping stone to Iraq and anywhere else in that part of the world who had oil.